skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a thorny issue. In the latter case, there is a US firm responsible for the integrity of the hardware they sell here. When malware was discovered in the firmware of PowerEdge servers Dell was shipping, Dell stood to lose a lot of customer loyalty if they didn't handle the issue correctly. What is the incentive structure like in a similar situation for Huawei?
Things you shouldn't do when you're recruiting bootstrapped
As it happens, I'm currently in a slow period and looking around for side projects that might lead to money. The other posters have some reasonable general ideas, but if you're willing to provide more detail, I can see whether it's the sort of thing that I'd be able to either help with or find someone else for—right now I can't determine enough from your post to say anything useful that hasn't already been said. You can send me email at my HN username at mailforce.net, if you wish. :-)
Basically, I like him because his work led to more scoops with larger impacts than any other journalist in recent history.

he released all the cables unredacted endangering countless lives around the world

It's not like he singlehandedly and purposefully did that. In fact, he tried very hard to do the opposite. They were released because one of the encrypted files he sent a journalist was still floating around somewhere when that journalist published the key Assange gave him in a book.

I think the backers made a mistake backing him. I think him taking flight shows what kind of person he really is. By going to the Ecuador embassy he has traded a trial in Sweden for a comfy prison in London leaving backers thousands of pounds out of pocket.

When you back someone who (right or wrong) thinks his prosecution is an international conspiracy, you kind of expect that things aren't going to go by the book. If they didn't anticipate this, they're morons. But I think they did anticipate it, I haven’t seen anyone complaining.
Reputedly, amplifiers that oscillate, and oscillators that do not, are the two great fears of analog designers ...
How To Import Media Files On Your iPhone Without Using iTunes
Bridge is a new tweak present in Cydia store, which allows you to import music from your device directly into the media library. The software works better if accompanied by a tool that handles downloads, like Safari Download Manager, but it can also carry out its task independently.
They're only easy if you know those definitions, which makes them trivia questions.
Hidden Gem of iOS6: File Uploads in Mobile Safari
I have a CS degree and I am employed as an Application Developer.

To me these questions are daunting. Am I the only one here who feels like they have an inferior CS degree? Reading the comments in HN threads usually makes me feel a bit dumb, but this post in particular makes me feel like a lot of money has been thrown at a degree that did not teach me a lot about Computer Science.
...you'd assume so, otherwise they wouldn't have applied to the court to try and get their money back.
Could 1Gbps optical “Li-Fi” be the solution to spectrum woes?
You're showing your bias in that question. In the spectrum outlined in the post you're replying to, from valuing "really really good at writing code" to valuing "makes a ton of money as a result of applying a little bit of coding skill in the right direction", you appear to value the "good at coding" side of the equation.

If you read the comment you're replying to again, you might notice it to be written by somebody who lies towards the other end of the spectrum. As such, you might as well be asking him how much he bench presses, as it is equally relevant (as in, not at all so) to the utility of the advice he's giving.
Why do you think it is bad for C? Take for example the Linux kernel where you find early exits basically everywhere. (See also my other response here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4626763)

Even less bad in C++ where destructors can automatically handle any cleanup (exactly that is also common practice in C++; making the cleanup implicit). Similarly in many other more high level languages with GC and/or automatic refcounting or so.

In rare cases, it might be more complicated, though.

But you seem to have some languages in mind where it really doesn't matter? What languages?
The Economist did a good, balanced piece on this subject: http://www.economist.com/node/21559922
I think this is a common theme - technical people who also have business skills are more likely to succeed; business people who have technical skills are similarly more likely to succeed.

Exactly. I was fortunate enough to realize this early on in college. Since that realization I've always made the effort to straddle the tech and business side. Programmers, even average ones, have the ability to multiply business effort by orders of magnitude. Look around in any business and even today it's easy to find places were software can help.
That is true but they could've questioned him in England, or even in the Ecuadorian embassy. They have questioned people outside of Sweden in other cases. It's the prosecutors "opinion" that he needs to be present in Sweden.
Hooray for Mozilla! Fighting the fight again, this time against a competitor that wouldn't even have been there but for Mozilla's success.

[To be more explicit: that is WebKit on mobile devices.]
But, a computer scientist once argued, multiple returns are structured: they return to the same point. Knuth wrote an article on structured programming with GOTOs, and pointed out that this can save memory.
Question for the author: are these things that YOU knew before working on the projects that required them?
> I ... never ... said .. any ... such ... thing.

Can you then perhaps elaborate how else we should take this quote from you:

> I suggest that you resist posting this kind of inquiry in a scientific discussion. In science, only evidence counts, not authority or expertise. In science, the quality of evidence is all that matters, not its source.

As well as this in your reply to me:

> The bottom line in science, and in any scientific discussion, is that authority and expertise are never important. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.

Of course you might argue that this is not a "scientific discussion", but that would make both of these messages meaningless or intentionally obtuse in the context they were posted.
Show HN: Trekk, Drupal for Universities
Where's the interpersonal skills section?

Attitude section?
It depends on what you mean by real world applications, but Chibi has many features including threads, networking and an FFI suitable for any application. R7RS large will have even more libraries. It will be complete when it's completed, but many of the individual libraries will be usable before then.
Here's a demo video of Flatfish, the part that handles the migration from legacy sites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWY5tU8ECJ0
The Challenge of Developing a Capability
I agree it's disconcerting. With the presidential election coming up, both Obama and Romney are eager to showcase their economic illiteracy by "getting tough on China". I certainly hope this is serious, and not just another instance of pandering to the ignorant.
The US may be an exception but here in Europe I think most people have 1 mbit upload; that seems plenty to me. Video might be tricky, but typically you use YouTube for that anyway. FB isn't in the business of hosting videos so why should a p2p social network be?
Let's see, are there any important markets out there today where a company has a monopoly? Well, there's the tablet market I guess, where Apple has 95% marketshare. But that's merely a $40 billion a year business with a 70% year over year growth rate so it's not really worth considering, right?

And as we all know Apple would never use strong arm tactics like excessive patent litigation to try to hamstring its competitors. And thank goodness that they promote an open platform where anyone can run whatever software they want.

Edit: the 95% figure is a bit out of date, however Apple's revenue marketshare in tablets still remains quite high (around 90% in 2011 and even in 2012).

Edit #2: For reference, when Standard Oil was brought to court on anti-trust charges they had a 70% market share. And US Steel in its heydey only controlled 2/3 of the market.
> taking someone's ideas and passing them off as your own.

It's incredible stupid that I can get sued for sitting down and working through a problem to a logical end just because someone, somewhere sat down and worked through the same logical steps. Physical inventions and chemical engineering make more sense but software patents...you're trying to patent a logical progression of ideas how does that make any sense at all?
111 comments 1 year ago had 155 upvotes, not 1. The upvote count patterns are interesting nevertheless :)
Those are part of the "existing-in-modern-society-as-a-human-being competency matrix", along with bathing and wearing pants as often as possible.
Mobile application testing: Five differences testers must take into account
Exactly.

Also, for example, when you have lots of "if" clauses, those languages force us to use mutable state (and a variable initialized as null) just to avoid early exits. But we can avoid both by treating the "if" as an expression, as in Ruby, Lisp, etc, or with the ternary conditional operator...

Plus, IMO, there are some situations where early exits are a good idea even in languages derived from C, such as with guard clauses/preconditions.

There's a nice discussion about that here with some points I made: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SingleFunctionExitPoint

(EDIT: I edited a lot but still couldn't make it clear that I agree with you, but I still ended up making points about completely different things, sorry about that, my english skills are lacking sometimes)
Disclaimer: I haven't played Eve in about 5 years.

The learning curve at the start of Eve is pretty steep and just keeps getting steeper as it goes along. The first time you get your brand new cruiser that you mined rocks for 5 hours to afford destroyed by a pirate you might want to cry (Stuff that is destroyed in the game generally stays destroyed).

I'm not sure about "social experiment" but I do remember thinking Eve looked a lot like what I imagine an anarcho-capitalist society would look like. There is literally a price tag on anything.

I do think that Eve is something best played with others, even towards the beginning, if you want to survive it is best to hang around with a few "mentor" types who can help you get through the jump gates to low sec where all the interesting stuff is (the gates are usually camped by some alliance or other who tend to be trigger happy).

I quit playing the game because the time investment was not worth what I felt I was getting out of it but I don't think it's really fair to write it off as just another MMO.
> when that function is 300 lines long

This is what I would focus on avoiding instead.
Are legality and morality interchangeable?
Sorry, I simply cut-n-paste from the search results - I'll go fix that now.

Thanks for the heads-up - much appreciated.

Added in edit: Now fixed - points and comments. Thanks again.
Well, if you'd be willing to take unpaid leave but you don't have the skills to develop it, why don't you keep working and spend your salary paying someone else to develop it for you?
Welcome to the intelligence trade - where everyone, regardless of country, would gladly trample their own grandmothers for a peek at someone else's secrets.

As a Chinese, I don't find this story very farfetched. If a company is deep in bed with the Chinese government, I wouldn't trust them any further than I can throw them - the level of governmental influence over private industry is far more substantial than what happens in the US.
This coding style is also referred to as "guard clause", embraced by e.g. Martin Fowler (http://martinfowler.com/refactoring/catalog/replaceNestedCon...) and Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/flattening-arrow-co...) (and by me ;-))
95% market share? Where are you getting that from?

This says 65%: http://www.bgr.com/2012/08/14/ipad-market-share-all-time-hig...

This says 52%: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrymagid/2012/10/02/android-co...

Try again?

Also, even if it was 95%, there are clearly competitors with momentum, and you could probably argue that the tablet market isn't really distinct from the smartphone market. But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly.
Also submitted to evidence was an internal Samsung document which reviews Samsung's way vs Apple's way, and it made quite a compelling case that Samsung put forth significant effort in copying Apple's form and function.

I'm sure much of the "evidence" can be debunked in such a way as this article has, but taken as a whole I think Apple's case was convincing.

If you want to see other good examples of wholesale copying, go to a brick & mortar computer store (such as the new Microsoft Store) and view how all of the PC laptops have island key keyboards, aluminium or similar metal casings, cameras on top, drop hinges, and massive button-less touchpads.
98%? Even if you assume this only counts desktop OSs, I think that is an exaggeration...
Totally! I pretty much ignored the first couple of people that voluntarily said they'd like to try it out. I thought "I'll come back to you when it's time to put your money out there"

After more and more people say the same thing, it gets hard to ignore. I've never had that before with other projects!

I've realised if I do it myself or if I save up & outsource it then it will take the same time. The outsourced one would probably be more effective and I could use my time on building a list. Yet part of me is stuck on at least building a part of it!

There is already a big player in this market but they offer a much more complicated solution & miss out on a tool that I think is fundamental. So mine is more aimed at small teams. The competition out there already has tested the market which is good! I calculated that 1% of their sales is like $4mm per year and I don't expect anything near that. It just proves that the market is big.

As good as it would be, I don't understand why a technical co-founder would work on my idea. Though having expertise on the team would bring me technically up to speed so I could pull my weight. I don't even think I'd deserve 50% in that scenario as they'd have to be the lead.

I wouldn't mind if someone came in with a similar idea, so long as it got built properly. First to build it owns the idea, I don't have anything yet.
I remember reading a thread someplace (I think here or at reddit) that criticized the traditional software developer interview process. One person made the suggestion that the reason why a lot of companies ask more...bookish knowledge that seems like its from college homework/final exam, is that they don't want to admit that what they do is relatively mundane, and doesn't really require the daily application of the kind of thing you find on your data structures or operating systems final exam. So, they add complexity to their interview questions, as well as their development process, to compensate.

Does anyone know if traditional, "real" engineering fields, (civil, chemical, mechanical, etc) ask detailed, technical kinds of questions during interviews, like software engineering is known for? I find it hard to believe civil engineers get bombarded with all day grill fests by other civil engineers about technical questions in interviews, but I really don't know.
RESTful API Playground as a Django Application
It does matter what the actual active ingredients of medication are, even in pain medication, whether the general population cares about that or not. These things really do have different properties and side effects, pain meds are not interchangeable.

But that shouldn't distract from your general point which I find hard to disagree with: pain medication is symptomatic relief. That doesn't make it irrelevant, but it doesn't mean people should ignore the underlying causes either. At the same time, these causes are sometimes idiopathic, (short term) unavoidable or (long term) untreatable.
Sure, some concepts are hard to grasp. Once upon a time the same was true of multiplcation. And reading. Then we, as a species, grew up. The only serious question is this: are you content to be part of a self-congratulatory "mostly male" priesthood, or do you consider that a problem to be solved?
"[...] their strength in the X market to gain an advantage in the Y market."

Isn't that pretty much Google's business plan?
This is so depressing. I just finished a degree in "Information Systems" with the hopes of being a developer full-time and I can't answer any of these questions.

I guess I should be mad at the institution, but that wouldn't be productive. Where do I start now to start learning what I actually need to know? It seems like there is so much I don't know.
I guess I'm not buying that Big-O is a necessary requirement to understand how fast or slow an algorithm will be. It could be that someone understands and uses the process behind it without being at all familiar with the notation.
Improving the forgotten password process
They have a local monopoly on their hardware. It's like cable companies: there may be several of them in a country but if there's only one in each city, they have a local monopoly that they can abuse.
Amazon has credibly claimed that the Kindle Fire has 20% market share. The Nook also has some not insignificant share. Even adding up the also-rans will probably get 3-5 more percent.

This is important because there is an inflection point where you are not allowed to use your monopoly in other markets -- that might be at 95%, but probably not at 75%.

I am making no judgement on their practices -- just correcting market share and when they may or may not be within the law.
Scheme48 complies to bytecode, which is run on a VM that's written in PreScheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PreScheme) which compiles to C.

Any system based on a C VM is going to be lots easier to port than something that compiles into native instructions. Also look at the Gambit-C implementation of Scheme, which compiles to C. The C itself is arranged like a VM, it's very fast (biggest issue with this approach is incremental compiling, where you need trampolines; the more code you block compile the more you can avoid this overhead).
Intelligence and the Stereotype Threat
Do you have a link to this internal document?
Why is the software development interview so radically different from the kinds of conditions a developer actually works under? I mean, I can't imagine someone on the job struggling with code, but only being able to look at a printout of it rather than in an ide/debugger, unable to look at a book, the internet, or ask someone for advice, and having a strict 30 minute or so time limit to figure out their problem.
>I simply cut-n-paste from the search results

Ah, we have a level 0 on the HN matrix here apparently.
What if you fail on line 20? Carrying on may cause cascading errors, what alternatives are there to return an error code directly apart from storing a return value in a variable, use a goto to the end and return once? (assuming this is C)
The equivalent under Linux is available in Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (ccsm), listed as "Color filter". It includes grayscale, several forms of color blindness as well as some novelty effects.
Heap operations? Bipartite graph? Implementing these is vanishingly rare. I'd wager no more than 0.1% of graduates who've seen these things ever have to maintain code that implements them, never mind writing them green field. And that comes from a guy who used to maintain a compiler.

You make a convincing case for your insularity IMHO :)

Now the didactic exercise of implementing a handful of data structures and algorithms like these from scratch has a lot of value. And knowing they exist, so you can look them up and find a library / implement if necessary, is also valuable. But knowing them 10+ years after college? The details are simply irrelevant; other things are more worth knowing off the top of your head.
I'm not sure what the best data source is, but http://jeremyreimer.com/postman/node/329 puts it up around 98% in the late 90s-mid 00s.
In the past we (mostly I) have complained of the Gov't lack of undermining of cyber security, and all things tech. Online attacks over the last decade have been plentiful, so it seems they're being really cautious to an extreme, even hurting consumer's options. But I can't blame them because: (A) In China large corporations and gov't are always extra friendly. (B) Cyber espionage and cyber attacks from China are not uncommon. (C) The US is not ready to protect their 'cyber' infrastructure.
Hopefully other HN's can see the following problem too: Huawei placing billions of dollars of communications infrastructure yet hoping they won't be able to monitor them, AND that whatever can be monitored is in no way available to the Huawei Chinese offices, which may or may not grant access the Chinese gov't to take a peek. This is over speculation and unlikely, but if I'm in charge of a security committee you have to assume this is possible and look into it.
I do have SOME technical skills and I know I can learn anything I need it's just in what timeframe.

I don't think it's that novel, just presented simply which would make using it each day and improvement on the current method.

I'm not even in the US, so being in California is even less likely. Though I do plan to spend some time there next year.
I don't see how anyone can defend Samsung seriously. I'm sure there is minutiae in the case that could be disputed. However, in the light of evidence like the comparisons in this imgur album [http://imgur.com/a/by8Xq], saying that Samsung didn't copy the iPhone as well as the rest of Apple's trade dress seems silly.
I think I could do the first and the fourth (economist by day, coder by night). Answers to the others elude me: good tutorials and relative importance to coding would be greatly appreciated!
Decorating Your JavaScript
"Groklaw suggests, rather shockingly, that Apple's lawyers might have been a little selective in how they presented some of this evidence to the court, by picking little parts of it that offered a different shade of nuance."

Obviously it was their job to present the evidence in this way. Samsung's lawyers should have countered that with the full picture.
>sounds like Silicon Valley had a solution 40 years ago to the patent mess: pretend they don't exist!

No they had a solution and it was MAD.

>The people at Signetics
told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent,
because what would happen if they tried to enforce
that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come
back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say
“These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re
violating”.

And it worked really well for a time. Unfortunately someone thought they could win and decided to "go nuclear" and now we're all stuck in the middle of a patent war.
It's funny, because the anti-trust lawsuit revolved entirely around the browser wars and "bundling". However, that law is rather vague bordering on poorly written (many instances of "bundling" are often a benefit to the customer) and was likely misinterpreted besides. Moreover, Microsoft won the browser war as much on releasing an outright better browser in a key time frame when Netscape was having extreme development trouble. Even without the bundling Netscape was at a huge disadvantage.

More so, the truly anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft (where they effectively bribed OEMs to prevent them using other OSes) didn't receive nearly as much attention.
Oddly, this is how your link looks in Firefox with the (un)clrd plugin applied: http://i.imm.io/H8V6.png

I'll be reading it with the plugin deactivated ;)